The mission of Buffalo Rising is embedded in its very name. A decade ago as Elmwood Avenue shop owner Newell Nussbaumer began to witness a resurgence in his native city he saw grassroots movements growing and activists who needed a voice. He sought to provide that with Buffalo Rising first a tri-annual and later a monthly print product and then finally a blog to supplement it online. But the blog took off and Nussbaumer along with his high school friend George Johnson—an established programmer who helped launch Orbitz.com—began to build and customize the site. The immediacy and the potential for interaction afforded by the Internet became vastly important to Buffalo Rising. “Otherwise you’re just always going to get beat by the big publishers” says Nussbaumer. “For us to be able to dig up big information and report on happenings in Buffalo as they were going on that was really just a lot of fun.”